Well, we haven't made any physical progress on the house - but we have a plan in play. The roof is under contract, the garage doors are under contract, the flooring is under contract, the windows are scheduled. EVERYTHING has a minimum 28 day lead - it's like the whole town got hit by hail or something... lol.
So, with nothing pressing to be done on the house this weekend I decided to rebuild the Geo Transmission. There's a real handy overview over at geometroforum.com but for some reason that site has been down this week. Luckily I had read through it a few times - there are no "gotcha" steps in this transmission.
You may recall my car started life as an automatic. I purchased a junkyard transmission from the Atomic Cowboy pick-n-pull over on the 'good side' of town. Converting the car to manual was pretty straightforward.
6 or 8 weeks ago I had the mechanicals all buttoned up and drove the car up to the muffler shop only to discover along the way that I had no fifth gear. I pulled the black top hat off the 5th gear and found a TON of metal shavings.
To be on the safe side I ordered a complete rebuild kit. Complete turned out to be pretty accurate - they only forgot the needle bearings, but all of the other bearings and seals were there.
I borrowed a 12 ton shop press from my friend Geoffrey, who coincidentally goes by 'Geo', and set to work.
Pressing the bearings and gears on and off of the shaft is super easy. It is literally a grown-up version of the Fisher Price ring stack for toddlers.
I changed out the final drive from a 4.10 to a more diesel friendly 3.52... To do this you have to swap out the entire driven shaft because the pinion gear is integrated into it. No worries, though.
I rebuilt each of the two gear stacks, drive and driven, and put all new synchronizers in to compliment the bearings.
Switching from the 4.10 (larger ring, smaller pinion) to the 3.52 (Smaler ring, larger pinion) required me to grind just a bit on the case of the transmission - I spun the driven shaft in the case and let the pinion make some witness marks on the case, then I took a little sanding drum and clearanced less than a millimeter out of the inside of the case.
This is why I started this whole thing:
Look at the metal that has melted (off of the synchro? off of the gear?)
So it's totally back together and sealed up. I'm feeling pretty damn accomplished!
Here'a little video (if it works) of the storm that hit the house (click it).